Installation of the component is similar to any CI helper: drop the file into the application/system/helpers directory and create the associated entry in the application/system/config/autoload.php file like so:

Then open the above and change the constants at the top of the file to specify where the error messages are sent.

In order to send mail the above component needs the truly excellent PHPMailer package which can be stashed in the same helpers directory. If you do decide to move it somewhere else change the corresponding constant that specifies the location of the library. A small note of warning though – the path to the PHP mailer libraries must be relative to the current file NOT the current working directory. This is due to how PHP handles fatal errors which for some reason sets the working directory to ‘/’.

Should there be any interest I may extend the above with other useful features such as RSS, SMS (text messaging) or other non-SMTP methods of emailing.

PHP 4 & 5 unfortunately have major problems working with UTF8. Hopefully this will be solved with PHP6 and its fancy pants new rendering interface.

Until then we have to make do and mend.

First setup your database to work with UTF8. I won’t waste time telling you how to do this in MySQL as many people far brighter than I have written more on the subject.

CodeIgniter comes with UTF8 enabled out of the box so there is little to do configuration wise. Unfortunately pasting a test string such as: 検索 (which I stole from this Wikipedia page) into a CI input box will quickly lead to calamity as CI tries to save the string as ASCII.